Amazon Wants To Sell Your Vampire Fan Fiction To The World — If You Keep It Clean

Have you ever loved a book or movie so much, say, a teenage vampire romance, that you just can’t stand it when it’s all over? Fan fiction, that distinct genre that takes existing characters off into new storylines, or rewrites those stories in a more satisfactory way only rarely pays off for writers, but Amazon’s new Kindle Worlds wants to change that.

Not everyone can have the success of Fifty Shades Of Gray (which stemmed from author E.L. James frustration with the lack of bunga-bunga in the Twilight series), partly because most fan fiction writers pen odes to copyrighted works through their own stories.

The Kindle Worlds program lets authors write their fanfic based on licensed series and then turn around and peddle those stories in the Kindle Store. Authors will get 35% of the net sales for books of 10,000 words or more, and 20% for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words, reports CNNMoney.

As for where the rest of that money, it’s unclear what cut Amazon will get and how much copyright holders will earn for each work of fanfic.

Writers won’t be able to just reel of their own steamy tales of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, however, as so far Amazon only has three licensed titles to work from: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. It plans to add more titles soon, and a would-be authors can start submitting finished work in June.

Oh and also, erotica might not fly with Amazon, as the content guidelines include the following restrictions: No pornography, no offensive content, no illegal/copyright infringing content, it can’t be a poor customer experience (misleading title, horribly formatted), no excessive use of brand names and no “crossover” stories that pick and choose elements from other series.

Kinda takes all the fun out of it, if you ask all those women who gobbled up Fifty Shades Of Gray like they’d never read a smutty romance novel before.

In any case, it’s high time I start working on that Fairy Rotter series I’ve been dreaming up about a composting sprite and her friends Don and Blermione!